Comments by "Gilad Barlev" (@GSBarlev) on "Microsoft Recall Is Worse Than We Thought" video.

  1. Fun fact: AMD's XDNA "NPUs" are (most likely) Xilinx FPGAs, which, if we ever get a Linux SDK, will make those chips incredible for retro console gaming.
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  2. There's an episode of The IT Crowd where our heroes accidentally get trapped next to a bomb-diffusing robot, which locks up, leading to the following interaction: IT worker: "What operating system is it running?" Police officer: "Vista!" IT worker: "I'm going to die!"
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  3. NPUs are hugely cool. They're either tensor cores capable of multiplying big matrices very quickly, or they're FPGAs—chips that can literally be reconfigured on the fly to optimize for a specific task or to match a given architecture (that's why you see them a ton in low-volume "emulation" boxes—because they're not actually emulating anything, they're running the original instruction set). It's the software that's the scam, not the hardware.
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  4. Yeah, local transformers are pretty fun to play with—if you have an AMD GPU, ROCm is entirely open source and enables you to spread your compute across CPU and GPU. I think everyone should try running an LLM or text-to-image model on their local computers, at least once, namely because it'll show people just how dumb these "intelligences" are. Don't get me wrong—I've gotten some absolutely trippy pictures out of SDXL, and Mistral is way more capable than I would expect a mere "7B" model to be... but these things aren't ready to take anyone's jobs any time soon.
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  5. I mean... what do you mean by account? You can 💯 disable there being a root account that you (or anyone else) can log into and thus require that every action be done using privilege escalation (sudo / doas). That's actually always been the default on Ubuntu-based systems. I don't think it's possible for any operating system to run without at least some processes running with complete system-wide permissions.
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  6. "always finds a way to get infected even though he's obsessed with antiviruses" Well that's the problem right there—malware masquerading as anti-malware tools is the oldest trick in the book.
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  7. They even let you try-before-you-"buy" thanks to WSL! Honestly, between them owning GitHub and employing some of the best minds in Open Source (Guido van Rossum, the Postgres guy,...), Microsol has done more to further Linux development in the last five years than anyone short of Gabe Newell.
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